Archives for January 2008

Sleepwear is a personal matter. In my youth you would have found me in standard boy attire. You know, fire trucks, superheroes, famous scientists and mathematicians. As I aged that slowly changed into plain pajamas and then no pajamas.

Ok, no pajamas is a bit misleading, I wasn’t naked. It had just evolved to a pair of shorts, unless it was really cold in which case I would wear a shirt too. That’s not to say that there wasn’t the sleep free and clean period of time because I went through that too.

There was something very pleasant about sleeping naked, until the Northridge earthquake, but that is a different story as is the challenges presented by sleeping naked at your girlfriend’s apartment when her roommate was out of town but suddenly showed up in the middle of the night only you didn’t hear her and because you weren’t wearing glasses couldn’t see well enough to recognize you were in the wrong bedroom.

That was an intentional run on sentence designed to try and describe the feeling you get when you realized that you just climbed into the wrong bed with the wrong person. In some places they call that “The Grapevine effect.” In fact in a study of the Dutch the Grapevine effect was proven to have an adverse affect upon many aspects of life. To quote an old inside joke, “Sleep with muppets and your life will be nothing but a shell of what it could be.” Maybe that is why it is not easy being green or from cleveland.

Back to our story. The naked thing was quite nice, especially in my old, no air conditioning apartment. The valley gets pretty hot during the summer. Fortunately the lack of a/c was a brief moment in time so sleeping in 100 degree weather wasn’t a long term task.

And even if it was there came a point in married life in which naked sleep wasn’t the best option because young children liked to come sleep with mom and dad.

So during the last decade or so I have found myself in sweats and shorts with an assortment of tops. For the most part this has worked out well. They may not be silk, but like them. Still, every now and then I have wanted something different. Instead of being like Mike I could be like Groucho.

Or perhaps I might try something like these or these. As a special favor to my readers allow me to remind you that it is important to get the right size. Screw up and you could end up looking like a stuffed sausage.

The answer my friends is that I dislocated the ring finger on my right hand. It happened during my third game of basketball. I blocked a shot and felt my finger move in a strange direction. I looked down and saw that the top half was twisted in an odd direction.

So I told the guys to find a sub for me and went off to get a bag of ice. I stuck it in the bag for about ten minutes and then when it felt numb I tried to snap it back into place. Three times I yanked upon it and three times I was denied.

Grumbling I headed to the locker room and carefully removed my clothes. I am right handed so it was a bit of a challenge. For a moment it reminded me of the first time I tried to unhook a bra. There were a few similarities. Both times I was intent upon getting naked and both times I foolishly fumbled around. The good news is that this time I wasn’t worry about trying to be cool, I knew that I’d get lucky.

Ok this wasn’t the same. There wasn’t any excitement tied to it. I grumbled and cursed under my breath. I quickly showered and headed off to Urgent Care. It was time to see a doc. They took x-rays and confirmed that it wasn’t broken. Then the nice resident and her attending took turns trying to reset it. After three unsuccessful tries it became apparent that Jack’s mighty tendon is just as stubborn as the rest of me.

So they called in the Ortho. I told him that I am not a hero, numb the damn finger. Of course this followed my own unsuccessful attempts to reset it and the docs.

Fortunately he got it done the first time and then they outfitted me with this nifty splint. So now I am doing my best to type one handed. This followed my miserable attempts to write left handed. I can’t wait to see how many other things are more challenging with one hand. Come to think of it, I just might have to go on a liquid diet.